The present invention generally relates to a character drawing method and more particularly, to improvement in a dot character drawing method for use in office automation equipment such as a word processor, a work station, etc. It is especially useful in an apparatus requiring high-speed drawing of characters.
Conventionally, a character drawing method utilizing a central processing unit (CPU) has been so arranged such that a graphic processor, in which drawing and editing functions are incorporated into one chip of large scale integration (LSI) by a FIFO (first-in first-out) method or a prefetch method, sequentially receives parameters, commands, etc., prepared and formulated by a main processor, such that drawing is effected and thereby results in a fixed distribution of the functions.
In this known character drawing method, if a large load is concentrically applied to a specific one of the plurality of processors, according to data to be processed, the following problem arises. Namely, since the load cannot be distributed over all the processors although the remaining processors have sufficient processing capacity beyond loads applied thereto, a processing capacity of its system as a whole is governed by that of the specific processor, thereby resulting in a drop of the processing capacity of the system as a whole.